On March 26th, Dr. Yoon Hang John Kim, the founder and director of Georgia Integrative Medicine, shared his perspective with Emory undergraduates in "Introduction to Predictive Health and Society", a popular undergraduate course at Emory University that introduces students the science of health and healthcare research.

In the West, people are mostly treated with either medicine or surgery. As Dr. Kim, explains, his practice considers a variety of therapies drawn from both Western and Eastern cultures that give patients a much wider range of options to truly offer services that integrate these techniques, rather that just sampling from them.

A key aspect of Dr. Kim's message to the class was that some aspects of health cannot be explained by the Western, or biomedical, model of health and healthcare. He discusses three concepts of Eastern medicine—the Tao, Complexity, and Synergy—as alternative ways of thinking about health. Further, these alternative models can help us to improve patient care, as there is very rarely a single cause of disease. As Dr. Kim describes in the clip below, "genetics, behaviors, depression, and social support can all contribute to heart attack and you can't say one thing caused everything."